Pancentric Blogs

A very interesting article was published on ReadWriteWeb.Com regarding a discussion between Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia Search, Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com and Marissa Meyer, Google’s VP of Search.

Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines.
The discussion then follows on how search engine results are irrelevant and filled with spam and weird stuff. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results.
Jason was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.

As a member of these sites like Wikia Search and Mahalo, the results you achieve are significantly better because we’re incorporating human intelligence into the mix.

Wikia Search will have another social angle. Users will be able to find other contributors to work on the search engine with them, behind the scenes from the masses who just want results.

Mahalo, an evolving human-powered Web guide primarily uses paid staffers to create its topic pages. A new “Mahalo Follow” feature lets users easily recommend sites to the engine– a more cost-effective way to quickly build a library of human-approved links.

Wales v. Calacanis

Marissa Mayer Comments

Basic transcript of the session at the conference.

Shane Richmond, communities editor at the Telegraph.co.uk, today announced on his blog that the Telegraph would be adopting OpenID by the end of February.

This is very exciting because not only are they accepting OpenIDs, they will be providing them for users also. As his post says, they are the first newspaper in the world and the first British media company to be doing this.

In brief, Open ID is a decentralised sign-on system allowing users to log on to multiple sites with a single ID hosted by any of the participating sites without having to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

Having multiple log ins for loads of different sites has been a constant tyranny when using multiple services across different machines at home and work. Open ID is a great step towards solving this problem. Having organisations such as the Telegraph adopting these standards will only help nurture adoption and accelerate its path into the mainstream.

Just found a great new (5 weeks old) podcast from Jon Hicks and John Oxton. The Rissington Podcast is pitched as ‘a web-geek version of Gardeners Question Time’. John Hicks found fame a few years ago with his design of the Firefox and Thunderbird logos and John Oxton specialises in semantic mark up and CSS.

Anyway, based out of an old RAF base with music and voice over to match, the podcast is a very witty and entertaining look at the world of web design and coding; including listeners’ questions, interviews and typeface of the week. They have a great format, long may it continue.

OK, so we’re three days in. But that still means 363 days to go (it’s a leap year don’t forget) in which all sorts of things can happen, and launch, and get bought.

I’m not going to do an exhaustive run down of all the things I think might happen this year. You’ve probably read loads of those types of posts already. What I want to look at is how attitudes might evolve, specifically in the corporate sector.
We all know about the rampant rise of social networks over the past 18 months. What’s going to happen over the next 12 months is anyone guess. What I believe we’ll see is more and more big corporates starting to adopt the common toolsets that are evident in all these sites and services.

It may have taken some time for many parties to realise, but a lot of corporate organisations, through their intranets and various extranets have large communities of employees, contacts and suppliers already in place. I know of one site inparticular which exhibits 40,000+ registered users all sharing a very specific professional interest area. Imagine the power of applying tools such as Port 80-safe instant messaging (think Twitter), a way of finding people by specific interest and location (think LinkedIn), a mechanism to create special interest groups (think Facebook Groups), a way to share images and videos for discussion (think Flickr or YouTube) and a way or distributing content throughout the network without clogging inboxes (think DropSend or similar).

By utilising these tried and tested tools we can increase loyalty and participation amongst the community as well as encourage adoption by parties who might otherwise see no discernible value in joining if it were a ‘vanilla’ one-to-many model.

My next prediction for 2008, though to be honest more of a wish, would be the widespread adoption by large organisations of lightweight platforms and technologies. I’ve had my time of requirements gathering and interface design for multi-million dollar, 18 month SAP implementations. Now, these things will always have their place. When tracking manufacturing output of a 35,000 strong workforce you will need some pretty beefy reporting tools. However, surely a wiki or blog or IM tool for a special interest group of 300 people within the organisation can be built in a lightweight, agile manner? I’m not a developer, but I have seen some pretty punchy pieces of functionality built in days and now in use by thousands on a day-to-day basis. There must be some merit in these ways of working for the appropriate projects.

Hopefully we will begin to see a new dawn in 2008 so we can begin to create some truly powerful communities for specific uses which take the online community and social media beyond glorified dating services.